The Tale of Lorana
by FreeForTaking
Summary: This fiction is set in the meantime of the original Mass Effect events, but from the perspective of the bounty hunter Lorana. Follow her as her simple life suddenly gets a mayor turn and she's drawn into events of unknown magnitude!


Lorana sighed as she looked down upon her rifle. It was lying on her bench shattered in hundreds of pieces just waiting for her to put it together again.

"How was it now again", she murmured to herself. "Were the catalyst between the plating's or in front of them?"

She thought about it for a while and then seemed to come up to a conclusion. As she started to reassemble the rifle, she made sure to not forget all the modifications that she was about to add to her most beloved belonging. _With the new lenses and stabilizers, she's going to perform as never before, _she though while the rifle slowly assembled in front of her.

A little later when she had succeeded to put all the parts together, she took some steps away from the bench and just looked over the rifle. _Now I'll just have to polish her and she will shine as never before!_

As she started to polish her rifle, she put some thoughts about the upcoming mission. She was tasked to assassinate a Volus diplomat who was about to depart for the terminus systems. It was said that he had a lot to do with the smugglings of huge quantities of red sand and other drugs to major mercenary fractions within the terminus space. The mission wasn't hard on it's own, scout the area, get to a vantage point, wait for him to arrive, take the shot and then disappear. It was also very well paid, usually she could receive maybe 5.000 credits for a job like this, but in this job she'd been offered 20.000 credits for the assassination, and that gave her a small suspicion about how easy the job would get.

When she had finished polished her rifle and put her polishing away, she decided to depart to the location of the assassination. It was a 30 minutes travel to the small spaceport of the moon she was located on. The moon didn't have a real name, just a identification number, 2506. That because of its solitary location in the outer rims of the galaxy, and because of the fact that the only thing going on this god forsaken place was the extraction of a lot of different drugs, such as red sand.

Before she left, she remembered to stack up on some extra medigel and grenades just in case of things not going as planned, plus she decided to bring her shotgun with her on this mission.

With that set up, she departed from her small shack and went to her small craft she used for transportation within this moon. As she sat down in her craft, she noticed an unread message on her omnitool. The first thing to pop up in her head when she saw the unread message was that the mission was cancelled, but then she realized that the recipient just was her sister who was asking for some money to borrow, as usual…

After she red the full message and replied that she'd send over 5.000 credits the next day, she decided to pull off and actually start to get moving. Meanwhile she was driving through the small and rocky moon, her thoughts wandered away from her current mission to a time when life was much more simple, to a time when all she had to care about was to simply enjoy life. It was a time of pure beauty and Lorana never ceased to hope that she would reach a similar point in her life again.

Her thoughts were disrupted as she reached the spaceport. The spaceport itself was nothing really to talk about. It merely had a hangar, and you could only dock ten ships here if you fit them really tight. There wasn't a single chance in the universe that you'd even try to fit in any kind of medium or large sized vessel in this port, and if you had the bad luck to be traveling with one of those, then you just had to get in orbit of the planet and use any kind of drop pod or equivalent to get down to surface.

At a first glance, it didn't look like there were a place to hide or any kind of vantage point, but quickly, she took note of a small transmission tower that would give her a good vantage point.

As she decided to take the transmission tower as her vantage point, she climbed out of her small vehicle and started to sneak towards the tower. Even though she didn't really se a single living being anywhere around her, she knew better than not taking precautions. _Now I'd kill to have some of these neat stealth implants, they would make my life much easier right now. _She thought this as she climbed the small ladder up to the top of the tower.

When she reached the top of the tower, she quickly looked around to take note of any eventual threats, but it was dead as ever before, and not a single living soul could be spotted anywhere near her current point.

The second she noticed that everything was calm, she begun to prepare for the assassination. First she took her sniper rifle from her back and made sure everything was firmly attached, as it should. When she was sure about that, she moved on to start calibrate the stabilizers. That was not an easy task, the stabilizers on her rifle would normally require several days of calibrations before they'd operate with optimal precision, but for now this had to do. As the stabilizers where somehow calibrated, she went on to calibrate the lenses so she'd focus the beam correctly and deal the maximum amount of damage for each shot. She calculated that she were on 350 meters distance and calibrated the lenses after that.

When all the calibrations were done, she laid the rifle down, put her eyes towards the aim and waited. She knew that it wouldn't take long for the Volus and his bodyguards to pop up, but until then she just had to wait.

Fifteen minutes passed…

Twenty minutes passed…

Just as she thought her contact had screwed up, she saw some movement at the hangar. From her vantage point she saw two Krogans guarding a small Volus who looked suspiciously a lot like the target. She could confirm the target some few seconds later as he moved towards the designated vessel. In the very same moment she felt the adrenaline rushing into her blood.

Time seemed to slow down as she put her aim at the head of the Volus. Her heart was beating with a steady rhythm and she prepared to hold her breath. As she held her breath, the last calibrations of the aim were made, and the trigger was pulled.

BLAM!

The Volus head splatted as the shot hit him straight in the head, unloading a massive energy burst straight into his brain. The Krogans around him froze in place for a short second, giving Lorana the time to shoot one of the Krogans in the head. The last Krogan quickly gathered himself and dove in behind cover. Now the waiting begun.

Lorana knew that at this very point, she could not do anything towards the Krogan hulking behind some cargo crates, what she also knew was that the Krogan had absolutely nothing to do towards her from hiss current point neither, so now it was all about who'd make the first move.

Now everything went terribly wrong. She suddenly heard a humming sound that increased in intensity every second. After some few seconds, a gunship arrived out of the hangar, and it had its aim on the very tower that Lorana was situated in.

As she now realized that, she also knew there were close to nothing to do that could get her out of this situation, and it didn't become better when two missiles from the gunship hit the foundation of the tower. She suddenly felt a falling sensation and before she knew it, the ground was travelling towards her with an alarming speed, and suddenly everything went black…

**Hayo hayo!**

**This was my very first chapter of my very first fiction, hope you enjoyed and please come with constrictive criticism!  
Also, this fic is not going to be centered around any of the original mass effect characters, without this will be centered around Lorana and her quests in the mass effect galaxy. Though she will be affected by the actions of Shepard and will have a lot of interaction with original characters!**

**Best regards**

**FreeForTaking!**


End file.
